File drop popup menu removal

[Aaron Seigo]

On September 7, 2004 12:26, Ishai Asa wrote:
> developers, a poll or a survey cannot be only among KDE developers. This
> issue should really be addressed by the usability team,  but I don’t
> know their opinions or what they have been done in this area.

i'm not the "usability team", but as one member of said nebulous entity i'd 
offer this:

one may move, copy, link or decide to not drop an object. which of these 
actions will happen when moving the item is not apparent simply by the act of 
moving it (unlike in the "real world"), and moreover figuring out how to 
modify the default behaviour without some explicit help is nigh impossible 
for most "average" computer users. for us sophisticated users, modifier keys 
are an obvious thing due to our familiarity and skill with the interface. we 
are the exception.

for these reasons the popup menu is a net win. not a complete win, but a net 
win. removing it would be a net loss.

> As a final note:
> Since there are valid arguments for both cases, maybe the solution is to
> make it configurable (and even have the default configuration be the
> previous dnd bindings/behavior).

oh, please no. a lot of things can and even should be configurable, but we 
really ought to avoid making basic things like this configurable. otherwise 
we will end up with a number of options that make our current count look cute 
and create even more burdon for help-desk (and irc-desk ;) tasks. not to 
mention that if it was made configurable, it should be system-wide for apps 
like kmail etc to follow otherwise we end up with inconsistencies, and this 
means a lot more work to get things Right(tm) if we move from our current 
position.

in fact, i'd love to see kmail lose its configuration option to eliminate 
those popup menus, which violates our current UI style guide =) :

http://developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/kde/style/dnd/index.html

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
Society is Geometric